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by HillRat 981 days ago
Bluesky has more modest goals, so it hasn't siphoned away a huge number of users, but -- purely anecdotally -- it's picked up a lot of the high-profile, high-volume, wide-distribution posters, such as dril or, more recently, a large number of journalists, as part of a fairly well-executed poaching strategy. (Post.news also took this approach, but it hasn't been quite as successful, and over the medium term I don't think a VC-funded, micropayments-based platform has much in the way of legs.)

bsky's small in absolute terms (about 1.5mm users), and lacks the global audience reach that Twitter still has, but it's got better "stickiness" than, say, Threads. This, oddly, makes it a bit more of a threat than Twitter's large-scale competitors, because Twitter has always been reliant on a small number of posters generating the bulk of its widely-shared content, and a small number of high-usage users generating the bulk of its ad views. Losing a relatively small number of the most dedicated Twitter users hurts more than a larger number of low-usage/low-ARPU users.

Where bsky goes from here is an open question (complex systems are notoriously hard to predict, and as they add more users without concomitant improvements in their other systems -- think T&S -- things could go pretty badly pretty quickly), but by damaging Twitter's content generation engine they are probably doing more damage to Twitter's P&L than Threads or Lemon8 ever did.